Final HTTP-NG
Activity Statement

Activity statements provide a
managerial overview of W3C's work in this area. They provide information
about what W3C is actively doing in a particular area and how we believe
this will benefit the Web community. You will also be able to find a list of accomplishments to date and a summary of where we are headed. The area overview
is often a good source of more generic information about the area and the background reading pages can help set the scene
and explain any technical concepts in preparation.

Between July '97 and Dec '98, the HTTP-NG Activity explored the future
development of the HTTP protocol. The motivation was the impression that HTTP/1.1 is becoming strained modularity wise as well
as performance wise. The HTTP-NG Activity produced a number of proposals that
successfully addressed these issues, which were presented to W3C members and
at an IETF meeting in Dec. 98. At the moment, W3C does not plan any follow-up
work on HTTP-NG.

HTTP-NG Architectural Model
Working Draft, 10th July 1998. This document defines a simple model for
what an HTTP-ng architecture might look like, along with a set of terms
for referring to parts of it.

HTTP-NG Web Interfaces, Working
Draft, 10th July 1998. This draft document describes an initial set of
extensible formal object interfaces.

HTTP-NG Binary Wire Protocol Working
Draft, 10th July 1998. This document describes a binary `on-the-wire'
protocol to be used when sending HTTP-NG operation invocations or
terminations across a network connection.

WebMUX Protocol Specification Working Draft, 10
July 1998. This document describes an experimental design for a
multiplexing transport, intended for, but not restricted to, use with the
Web.

While there was interest in the Project, the general feeling was that it
was too early to bring it to IETF and that we needed to provide a plan for how
to get where are today to where we would like to be. One of the arguments that
we got was that people were just getting used to HTTP/1.1 and saw HTTP-NG as a
'warm-hole' into a very different Web infrastructure than what we have
today.

Two results came out of this:

Instead of attempting to promote the complete architecture depicted
above in one step, it was proposed to target the WebMUX work in particular
in order to make that an IETF Working Group. The expected goal of this
Working Group was to develop a multiplexing protocol able to deliver
multiplexed bidirectional reliable ordered message streams over a
bidirectional reliable ordered byte stream protocol (such as TCP).
However, as of the time of writing, the IESG did not find enough
interested parties to actually establish a WebMUX Working Group.

An important piece of HTTP-NG was to investigate whether more formalized
types can be made flexible enough to support the evolution seen on the
Web. Especially Mike Spreitzer, Xerox Parc, has been working on this topic
and has been in contact with the XML Schema Working Group in order to see
whether it is possible to achieve a next generation unified datamodel for
the Web. This work is still in progress.